Ficlets.com: a Web 2.0 Story

In yesterdays' post "Ficlets: A Story" I talked about and illustrated and told ficlet-styled stories about some of the basics of the new AOL-sponsored online community, Ficlets.com. In this post, I'll revert to a more standard documentary mode, and cover some of the other features of the site. While Ficlets is just starting out, and the site still has some quirks, there is a lot of functionality that you might not notice in a casual browse through the site.

Home: Your Desk

If you're logged in, your home page has sections titled "Your Desk" and "Your Library." Your Desk lets you start a new ficlet or resume work on a saved draft. There's also a link labeled "Clippings." Clippings is the term used on the site for saving a story. When you're reading a story, you'll see a link labeled "Save to clippings." If you click this, then that story is saved in your "Clippings" file -- which means it's easy for you to come back to the story at a later time. It doesn't look like you can remove stories from your "Clippings" file yet, but I'm sure that capability is on its way.

Home: Your Library

Your Library has the following components:

• Published ficlets: the ficlets you have published
• Favorites: the list of stories you've rated with 4 or 5 stars
• Inspiration: Ficlets embeds images from Flickr to provide images for inspiring stories
• Posted comments: the comments you've posted to stories (including your own stories)
• Tags: the tags you've applied to your ficlets

Inspiration: the Flickr Connection

If you click the Inspiration links that appear on many pages, you're brought to a page that invites you to "Get Inspired by Photos," for example:

These are all images from Flickr. If you enter a term into the "Search" box, you'll get a list of images from Flickr that were tagged using the word or term you entered. For example, when I searched for "chihuahua" the following image set was returned:

Note that you can also switch your search to "Stories," in which case you'll see a list of all stories on Ficlets.com that have been tagged using that word or term.

Ficlets and Web 2.0

This demonstrates that in a sense Ficlets is a kind of Flickr, but for words, for little stories. Flickr is indeed a good model. Indeed, Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson calls Flickr "The Seminal Web 2.0 Service", and lists "10 things I've learned from using Flickr" in his post. I found "The Seminal Web 2.0 Service" very interesting in part because Fred says that it was using Flickr that taught him these things, not investigating its Business model or its hardware and software infrastructure, etc.

It does look to me that the creators of Ficlets.com have applied most of what Fred sees as of fundamental importance in a Web 2.0 service to their new venture, plus some additional features such as connections to AIM (which is fast becoming an outstanding Web 2.0 service in its own right, with each enhancement and connection AOL adds to it).

Tags, Feeds, AIMShare

Among the features Ficlets provides that Fred considers essential are tagging and feeds. You tag your own stories, and you can search for stories using tags. You can subscribe to a feed related to any individual story, and each Ficlets member also has a feed you can subscribe to.

An added capability is the link to AIMShare, which essentially allows you to share a web site or publish whatever you'd like to publish to your AIM buddies. In the case of Ficlets, you can publish your latest story, or a ficlet you find interesting, inpiring, hilarious, or whatever.

Conclusion

That's a quick tour through Ficlets.com. It's one more indication that there is a large group of people at AOL who "get it" when it comes to the modern and future Web. It's certainly going to be interesting to watch what happens with Ficlets!

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media